City of memory

"One year before Hurricane Katrina flooded his childhood home, photographer John Woodin returned to the city that shaped his life. Led by intuition and fading memories, Woodin wandered the neighborhoods of his youth and photographed the architecture of the working poor, documenting the conflict between of order and chaos, the effects of poverty and neglect, and the incongruous beauty of decay." "The day after the search for Katrina's victims was abandoned, Woodin returned to the same locations he documented the year before. Most of the visual landmarks he relied on were altered or missing, and the neighborhood he grew up in was barely recognizable. It was as if a lifetime had passed since his last visit. Pairing photos of pre- and post- Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Woodin creates a document of the changes resulting from that natural disaster. The photographs remind us how tenuous our own existence is and how quickly our worlds can change." --Book Jacket.